Your Morning Briefing will return after Memorial Day. Enjoy the sunny weekend!

The Trump administration released its highly anticipated "Make America Healthy Again" (MAHA) Commission report yesterday. This first report is merely intended to scope out the scale of the problem, with policy recommendations to follow within 180 days. But it's still an important first look at what the "MAHA agenda" might actually look like in reality. Here's the report PDF, and here's the press conference video.

The report describes a "chronic disease crisis" affecting American children, including high rates of obesity, asthma, autoimmune conditions and behavioral health disorders, and catalogues what it believes are the main causes.

And they are, according to the report:

Poor Diet and Ultra-Processed Foods. Almost 70 percent of an American child's calories today come from ultra-processed foods, according to the Commission. The report particularly focuses on the removal of nutrients during grain processing, added sugars in packaged foods, and the imbalance of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids in Western diets.

Environmental Chemical Exposure. The report raises concerns about cumulative exposure to various chemicals including pesticides (particularly glyphosate and atrazine), PFAS in drinking water, microplastics, and fluoride.

Lack of Physical Activity and Screen Time. The report noted American children's transition from what it calls an "active, play-based childhood to a sedentary, technology-driven lifestyle." The commission blames decreased walking to school, reduced recess time, and excessive screen use for contributing to both physical and mental health problems.

"Overmedicalization" and "Vaccines." The report expresses concern about increased prescriptions of psychiatric medications, antibiotics, and other drugs to children. The report found that prescribing medication to children has skyrocketed in recent history, such as a 250% increase in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder prescriptions between 2006 and 2016 despite scientific evidence that the prescriptions did not "improve outcomes long-term," as well as a 1,400% increase between 1987 and 2014 for antidepressant prescriptions for kids.

Less than the report's findings, what we were most interested in was the commission's approach to so-called mainstream science. There is a difficult balance to be struck, one that could spell either success or failure for the MAHA Agenda. Any rational person with an open mind who has looked into this set of issues understands that there are a lot of areas where the mainstream science is either unsettled or deeply flawed in some way, and that some "outside the box thinking" is called for. At the same time, anyone, and especially senior officials of the US government, should avoid falling into a pit of pseudoscience and woo. The possibility of striking this balance is the great promise of the MAHA Agenda.

And we must say… We are quite happy with what we found.

A lot of things in there are backed by very sound science, such as environmental toxins, overuse of antibiotics. In most areas where the report departs from scientific consensus, it does so in ways that are cautious and, in our enlightened amateur view, warranted. A good example of this is the report's emphasis on ultra-processed foods: the science on ultra-processed foods is mixed, but a common sense view that there must be a link between factory-made foods with weird chemicals and obesity and chronic disease in children seems like something that must be explored.

Color us more optimistic—still cautiously so, but more optimistic!—than yesterday about the MAHA Agenda.

Policy News You Need To Know

#AISafety — Time for us to talk about "AI safety" again, this time because Anthropic, one of the frontier AI labs, released a big new version of its model, Claude. Anthropic advertises itself as the most safety-conscious of the AI labs (this is also why Claude is more censored now than ChatGPT or Gemini), and along with the new model it has published a comprehensive "safety report." The report includes horror stories involving contrived scenarios where, with enough prodding, the AI does strange or rogue things. It has given us no reason to change our view of these "AI safety" initiatives, which is that they are largely, to use a term of art, BS. If you tell an AI to go rogue, it will go rogue. This teaches us nothing about "AI safety." We view this entire type of effort as essentially marketing for these AI companies. It helps to advertise their models as extremely powerful, quasi-sentient, and especially to raise money at inflated valuations from gullible investors who believe that frontier AI labs are not just working on cool new technology, but are in the process of building some kind of new god.

#TradeWar — President Trump woke up this morning and decided to threaten the EU with a 50% tariff. Free trade advocates will of course be infuriated, but President Trump does have a legitimate grievance against the EU. In particular, as European professor Dirk Auer has written, its DMA law is largely weaponized to abusively fine American tech companies. It should also be noted that, among large trading partners, the EU has been singularly unresponsive when it comes to negotiations with the US. This may be a negotiating tactic, but in this case Brussels shouldn't be surprised that President Trump is upping the ante.

#TradeWar #Tax — That said, it's also true that the VAT is not a protectionist measure.

#HigherEd — The Administration's war on Harvard continues with, this time, the interruption of foreign student visas. Harvard has come out with an unhelpful assertion that "without its international students Harvard is no longer Harvard." This is both blatantly false and very unwise to say when one is an American university. Harvard is part of America, not of some global village—both morally, and in the very practical sense that it is subject to US jurisdiction. They should do well to remember it. After decades of crypto-communist agitation, and blatant systemic racial discrimination, everything that comes to Harvard is deserved.

#Terrorism — From the Free Beacon: Suspected Israeli Embassy Shooter Worked for Woke Education Group Backed by Ford, MacArthur Foundations. The organized left's abetting of anti-semitism kills.

#StudentLoans — We've previously written about the Conservative Education Research Network, a worthwhile initiative from AEI pulling together conservative education experts from everywhere. AEI's Preston Cooper has published a new CERN report on an important issue: rebuilding the student loan system after the damage wreaked by the Biden Administration. As the report notes, "the Trump administration faces the challenge of transitioning 35 million borrowers back into active repayment. As of March 2025, barely one-third of borrowers not enrolled in school were making on-time loan payments."

#GoodGovernment — The GAO has weighed in on pauses to DOT funding, calling them an illegal impoundment. Russ Vought had an interesting tweet about this: "Just so we are all clear over the next several months. The Government Accountability Office or GAO is a quasi-independent arm of the legislative branch that played a partisan role in the first-term impeachment hoax. They are going to call everything an impoundment because they want to grind our work to manage taxpayer dollars effectively to a halt. These are non-events with no consequence. Rearview mirror stuff."

#GoodGovernment — From ATR: Trump Executive Order on Public-Sector Unions Clears Latest Legal Hurdle

Friday Essays

This week's crop of essays is particularly rich, so it's good that you have a three-day weekend to read all of them! (They will be on the test.)

The first "essay" is the transcript of the recent hour-long interview of Vice President JD Vance by New York Times conservative columnist Ross Douthat in the Vatican, which is the most thoughtful interview we can recall being made by a senior political leader in America, of either party, in many many years, perhaps in our adult lifetime. It covers, in depth, topics such as the relationship between Christian and Catholic faith and politics, immigration, trade policy, and AI.

Another really good (and relatively short) essay we strongly recommend is by Thomas Hochman of the Foundation for American Innovation putting down some thoughts after spending one year in DC. Just full of very good nuggets for anybody in our world.

The Summer 2025 issue of American Affairs is out. Lots of gems in there, particularly on topics related to trade and industrial policy, and we encourage you to browse.

In the endless carousel of news, you may have already forgotten the fact that last week, an atheist anti-natalist terrorist detonated a car bomb outside a fertility clinic. Katherine Dee, a writer who has made a career out of very intelligently analyzing online subcultures and their impact on the broader culture (such as how much of wokeness and transgenderism were incubated in the social microblogging site Tumblr in the late 2000s and early 2010s), takes us through the history of the bizarre movement that gave us this terrorist act, "efilism," an outgrowth of "effective altruism," the popular-in-Silicon-Valley philosophical movement. "Efilism recasts ongoing life as an emergency whose only adequate remedy is species-wide euthanasia—an ethic that, in Palm Springs, moved a seed from YouTube debate culture to a car bomb on an ordinary Saturday morning." It's all equal parts very fascinating and terrifying.

Speaking of online subcultures escaping containment to influence the real world: another noteworthy event from last week is the fact that Curtis Yarvin, the neoreactionary and monarchist blogger whose work is a subterranean influence in Silicon Valley and the New Right, was invited to Harvard, the heart of the "Cathedral" Yarvin denounces, to debate Professor Danielle Allen. At The American Conservative, Nathan Halberstadt offers us a nice reported summary of the debate and of the issues surrounding it. And of course, if you have the time and are so inclined, here's the video of the debate itself.

There's nobody whose insights on the Vatican we trust more than Michael Brendan Dougherty, which is why you should read his reflections on the future of the Papacy on the morrow of the election of Pope Leo XIV.

Charles Fain Lehman of the Manhattan Institute has a very thoughtful essay in The Dispatch on a thorny but important issue: how should we approach temptation as a public policy problem? In the 21st century, the rise of "temptation products", from porn to pot to doomscrolling to gambling to "buy now, pay later" DoorDash burritos, creates a problem, since as the market and technology causes those products to become ever-more bewitching, "our ability to control ourselves" hasn't improved. Writes Lehman, "the uncomfortable reality of human variation in self-control has meant a growing share of the population is unable to stop itself" from using, or overusing, many of these products and services. "Both the right and the left struggle with this fact. On the right, free-market libertarianism regards the regulation of temptation as anti-capitalistic nanny statism. […] Those on the left are theoretically more willing to regulate. But they are wary of making judgements about individuals’ self-control. It’s fine to talk about big business preying on the poor, but the problem with people buying Coachella tickets on credit is not that they’re poor. It’s that they’re irresponsible—a normative judgment many progressives are unwilling to make. Moreover, many of the most prominent temptations—like porn and pot—are things no self-respecting leftist would criticize, for fear of being compared to a censorious social conservative." It's truly an excellent piece.

At Commentary, Robert Pondiscio writes of a tragic story, through his review of the book "The Lost Decade" by Steven Wilson: "How Wokeness Destroyed An Education Miracle." This is not an exaggeration, or only very slightly so. The "lost decade" is the decade when the so-called "no excuses" charter school movement, as exemplified by schools "like KIPP (the “Knowledge Is Power Program”), Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, YES Prep, and the Noble Schools," once celebrated, lost its "nerve" and gave in to woke ideas about underachievement being caused by systemic racism.